[00:00:00] Katherine: Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman. I am talking to Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis. This is our first episode back for the new year. So we are very glad to be back. We hope everyone had a nice, a little break. Some time off. We're going to have a little bit of a shorter episode, I think, hopefully, and we're going to kind of catch up, uh, with each other and with y'all.

So with that, I just want to make sure to remind everyone to visit us at reality2cast.com, because we will most likely have some supplementary links and stuff like that. And, you can sign up for our newsletter, which also should resume again now that the new year is upon us. So with that, um, yeah, so we were just talking a little bit about a few things.

One of the things we wanted to mention really quickly is just so doc has been working on some interesting forward looking technology, and I thought maybe we could get a quick update about what's going on over there. 

[00:01:01] Doc: Sure. Some of you may know that my wife, Joyce, and I have been visiting scholars, which is kind of half right.

We are visiting, uh, at, uh, Indiana university at the Ostrom workshop there. In fact, we've been living there in Bloomington Indiana for the last few months, though I'm in California right now at our, at our, at our actual home. But we're, we've been living in, in Bloomington because that's the rubber of ideas that I've been spreading for the last 20 some years are, are hitting the road.

We have a project there through customer commons. That's customercommons.org has a project called the byway. The long name for that is the intention by way that's intention not attention. And where we actually have a student involved who's writing code and we have professors involved, not just there, but at BYU.

Phil Windley, who I think has been on here, uh, in inventor of, or co-inventor of Pico's, which I think are the real internet of things, the real things that could be. Rather than the Apple of things and the Google of things in the Amazon of things. And something called didcom, "D-I-D-com," look that one up, there's a lot of development going on with that.

And there's some fresh code going out of the basic idea is what I wrote about in the, in the intention economy. The book that I came out with in 2012. Um, and that, in, in that book, I forecast a world in which we can advertise what we're looking for as it were on and not inside somebody's silo, do it independently outside of any existing e-commerce system, but in a way that's secure and direct and, distributed. And we're getting somewhere with this, we're actually starting to move forward. So anybody who is interested in talking to me about it or working on that. Um, I have to update the customer commons website. There is a on the blog there, the last post pointed to an FAQ, which, because we changed the tech is going to be completely rewritten, but it's a, but the cool thing is it's open source tech that we're working with and it's stuff that people are already working on in the world that's really encouraging.

And so we're moving forward with it. And that's kind of, a lot of fun. There's a sense of real, you know, before many ways that we had something in one Newtonian state kind of a body at rest. And now it's in another Newtonian state, which is a body in motion and, uh, feeling pretty good about it. And there are other developers too, here in, in Europe.

A lot of stuff, a lot of stuff going on, and it's all very encouraging in a world where there's a lot of unencouraging things going on. So this is one of the things that really is encouraging. 

[00:03:36] Katherine: Well, cool. Thanks for the update. So the other thing that maybe we could talk a little bit about, so we were all, you know, we're all nerds here.

We like our consumer electronics, and what is also interesting about at least the three of us is we are apple users. We all use apple products. I know. And, but we like to pick on apple at the same time. And one of the things that's popped up recently is the air tags again. And this is something that we've talked about in previous episodes.

When they first came out, we were raising some red flags as were a lot of other people. And. And I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about what's happening in the news, which is basically that police departments and the sort of mainstream has picked up on the fact that these things might be a little bit dangerous and might facilitate stalking and, and, and some other things like that.

And I thought maybe we could talk about that. I mean, on one hand, again, we're all apple users and who among us has not had to use the "find my" feature to find our cell phone when we can't find it. In fact, I think that's probably the most used feature on my apple watch is locating my cell phone. Yeah.

[00:04:45] Petros: Yeah. My children lose their devices and it's a great et cetera, but you know,

it's, it's funny how. Did people not think that this was going to be used for evil? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:06] Katherine: Well, that's exactly what we said back then. We're like as much as we liked this feature and as much as we would love to be able to find our keys or any other device that's tagged with one of these nifty little, uh, silver discs.

It seems so obvious that this could be harmful and, and as, and to their credit, apple did attempt to at least put protections in place. You, you get a warning if you have an apple device, and now they have an Android app too, if there's an unknown air tag in your vicinity so that, you know, you can, you can find out why it's there.

But to be fair, there are, there are a couple of things here. First, it takes some time. Before that feature I think it is enabled. Initially there was a think a three day delay before you would get any sort of warning, but I think that may have changed, but more importantly, Does it even matter because people, people aren't always paying attention and people aren't, people don't go about their daily lives.

Like, you know it with the mindset of, oh my God, what's tracking me. I mean, I mean, unless you're us maybe, but, but for the most part, people are not thinking about these things. This is not in the front of their minds to go inspect all of their bags for unknown, uh, tracking devices. So this is something that could so easily go unnoticed.

And I think that's something that should have been more obvious. 

[00:06:25] Petros: I don't know what you're talking about. I wake up every morning thinking to myself who is stalking me today. 

[00:06:32] Katherine: Well, you're so much more popular than me. 

[00:06:33] Petros: First thought in my mind. 

[00:06:35] Katherine: Yeah. So yeah, I think, you know, apple is so good at anticipating the needs of users. Needs we didn't even know we had, right? And then this one case, how did it all go so wrong? 

[00:06:49] Doc: Go ahead, Petros.

[00:06:50] Petros: I was going to say I'm sure during its development at Apple, Apple engineers posed the same question and maybe the higher ups said I don't care. We're going to sell it anyway, right? 

[00:07:03] Katherine: Maybe they're vctims of their own optimism. Maybe they have faith in humanity that we just don't. 

[00:07:08] Petros: Well,Jobs did, didn't he? I mean, when, when the, uh, when the iPhone first came out, I know, I know apple was pushing real hard against anything adult or pornographic. Right. Um, to be, you know, for their devices to be hosting or accessing anything related to that stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong. I, I vaguely recall this in the early days of, um, the iPhone and, and, and, and so forth, but I mean, people are going to find a way to misuse these things. They're going to find... 

[00:07:43] Katherine: I would argue that regular old garden variety porn is not misuse, but anyway. That's nobody's business. 

[00:07:53] Doc: Oh, a couple of things. One is, um, I I'm trying to think of who said it, but it's a really good point, which is one side of one sign of a good technology. Is that it's oh, I think it was Tim O'Reilly.

He might be, I might be wrong. No. So Tim apologies if it wasn't you, but one sign of a good technology is that it's very hard not to imagine all the bad uses for it. So there's just all kinds of... name any good technology there are going to be bad uses for it. So that's one thing. Another is, um, I think, you know, inventions are the mother of necessity, I mean, people, I mean, it's an amazing thing to me about the iPhone is that when it first came out.

Um, you know, I remember my wife looking at it and said, I can use that. I can, I can, there's a use for that. For me. She never saw that with any of the earlier smartphones that are now dead, the blackberries and the others. Uh, but that one, you know, I had a bunch of, I did a whole series. I had a relationship with Nokia and I had a series of Nokia fancy phones had a whole keyboards on them and had a really crappy web interface. And we're crippled in the U S because the phone companies didn't want you using wifi and a bunch of stuff like that. And then the iPhone came out. She took one look at it and wanted it. But again, at the beginning to Petros's point, You were going this direction, Petros, but Steve jobs didn't even want an app ecosystem on there.

And the other people thought that up and, and he did it to his credit. He didn't resist it and saw the value in it. And that took off well before he passed. But, um, you know, but they didn't anticipate that they thought they were going to control the entire ecosystem. In fact, they became, you know, the host of an ecosystem.

You know, the, the big question for me is can, is it possible to have. And open ecosystem for, for anything. Are we always going to, are we always going to need the platforms, whatever the platforms are we going to need an apple or Microsoft or Google or an Amazon or somebody sitting under an ecosystem in order to have it fully work.

And I think the, I insisted that we don't, but there's an awful lot of, uh, an awful lot of proof to the contrary on that right now. 

[00:10:01] Katherine: Yeah. I think it depends on who your audience is, who your end user is. There's a there's, there will always be a very large segment of the population who will give up a lot of control just for ease of use.

[00:10:16] Petros: Yeah. So I'm guilty of it too. I there's been many cases where I said, Hey, I don't care. 

[00:10:24] Doc: Well it's yeah, we all have a budget of caring. Right? How much could we care about any particular thing? Right. And we, and we're always making trade-offs. If we're late to something, we might be speeding and taking a risk and of causing a traffic accident. There's just lots of judgment calls we make all the time. And most of those are emotional. They're not necessarily rational. Um, I, but I wanted to bring up something that that's sort of on this topic. And we talked about earlier, before we started the thing and I don't want to go too far into everything else that he was talking about, but there's one thing that, um, Moxie, Marlin.

Well inspo, well, Marlinspike wrote in his now much cited, uh, uh, piece, uh, uh, more or less taking issue with web 3.0 but my, at least the way it's going and a lot of the crypto stuff involved it, but that's not where I wanted to go with it. One of the things he said was one of the learnings about web 1.0 is people don't want to run their own servers.

And I wanted to take issue with that. Obviously, a lot of geeks want to run their own servers. And what does it mean to run your own server now? Anyway, I mean, Petros, you helped me move searls.com from, you know, a thing, a thing that actually started as a device under my desk in California to a rack that was in Virginia, and then it was in Texas, but it was mine and it was in somebody's rack to something that was in a virtually hosted place.

It's in a cloud. It's still mine. I'm still running it. You're still helping me with that if I have any trouble. And you're sure, you know, so, so what does that mean? Let's, you know, there, I think, I think what happened is that, you know, big companies, they could make interesting platforms that were extremely useful and had a very low threshold of entry, took advantage of the fact that rolling your own was still hard, but I'm not sure rolling your own has to be hard. And I think that's one of the things that, that, 

[00:12:21] Petros: yeah, it's not that rolling your own is hard. The hard part is the securing and maintaining it. And that's the inconvenience. That's the, that's the part that requires a bit more knowledge in, right? You have to be on top of it. There's always going to be a new threat that's going to tear down your ecosystem, you know, your, your server and whatever it hosts. So, yeah, staying on top of that is, is an absolute nightmare, which is why I I've been, I've been hosting my websites for many, many years.

And it was recently that I did what I helped you do, and that is migrate all my stuff to a virtually hosted environment and just let the security and the, you know, the, um, the vulnerability updates be managed by somebody else. And that way I just focus on my content and my content alone. And I don't have to worry about that, but yeah, you know, rolling your own.

It's not the is not the problem. It's just the maintaining it of. Right. Yeah. And I was thinking too, because I'm sitting here in a house that we own. It's not a small house, not exceptionally large, but it's, um, it's 15 years old now. There's a lot of work. It needs, I spend some of every day dealing with something.

I never thought about the landscape lighting, the, the, you know, the. The shower control for hot and cold, you know, all these things cost a lot of money and just, you know, but, but there is this dream of home ownership. Why can't we, if it's hard and complicated, but okay. With most people to own a home on the, on the, on the, in the physical world, why should they not want to own a home as it were in the virtual world, knowing that's going to be some work.

Right. But there are, but the nice thing. Like with the landscape lighting, I made a bunch of calls. I mean, it's 15 years old. I found that there actually are replacement parts. I went down to the local place that deals in those parts. I managed to find a connection to get a bunch of them. That was almost enjoyable to me.

Is there something like that that's possible in the physical world or is it just in a virtual world or are we just kind of stuck with. Okay. The big guys are going to take care of everything for me. But, but again, in my case, I actually am running a server. Most of you aren't running a server, right?

They're just gonna, they don't have, I have searles.com. You go to searls.com you're looking at my server. Uh, but, but it should be easier. I mean, and I think, I don't know where I go with this. I think it's still early. I think this is really early on whatever this is going to be. And actually dividing history in a web one, two, and three is just way, way, way too simplistic.

[00:15:13] Katherine: So that is actually a perfect segue. So when you just said dividing history, right? So something that I noticed in that's related to the, the Moxi post you mentioned, but also, um, something that I noticed based on a tweet from Matt Mullenweg, who was, as many of us know the founder of WordPress, he was, he was on the cover of Linux journal.

I interviewed him super nice guy, um, who doesn't love WordPress, right? Yeah. So Matt posted pointing out. There's sort of revisionist history going on, right. About what we consider to be web 2.0, that web 3.0 is supposedly to fix. Right. But he pointed out and, and we, we were there. We remember this that, you know, early on web 2.0 was about platforms and interoperability.

Then it was WordPress as he points out flicker six apart. Technorati delicious. If anybody even remembers any of those. Right. Or some of those. And if you go back and think about. The what we thought of as web 2.0, and this is when I was just getting started with technology and the web and, and external, um, you know, the things we were focusing on or aggregation and, and, um, and, you know, RSS feeds, right.

That was a new thing at one time. And, you know, and we wanted, you know, everything, everything was a protocol and everything could sort of. Communicate with each other and you could have all these various social media aggregators. Back then we could still have chat on multiple platforms at once, do it, does anybody remember using Adium for example, or even, or, uh, or Jabber.

I mean, that was web 2.0, and now we are going back and redefining it as something that Facebook controls where that's not really true. Web 2.0, does not equal social media. There's a lot. There was a lot more that came just before the Facebook phenomenon happened. So, you know, I think that's, that's an interesting point that are we re are we really even having the conversation in the right way?

Because if we don't remember what web 2.0 is then how are we really comparing where we're going with web three?

[00:17:27] Doc: Yeah. You know, it w we always, there's a natural human tendency to want to simplify things. I mean, I, I hear, I mean, it's kind of fun to bash Silicon valley and big tech right now, but what are those, you know, I mean, uh, you know, Is IBM big tech is, you know, um, I was talking to somebody from SAP earlier and SAP is like one of the biggest operators in the entire e-commerce world, but they're largely invisible because they're kind of backend.

And are they big tech? Are they who we're talking about? When we say big tech and Silicon valley is more conceptual place than an actual place. You know, there's a, and the notion that Silicon valley wants this or that, I think wall street is a much more coherent entity as a metronome. That's what that is a med an IM um, then Silicon valley is, you know what I mean?

It's a, I mean, it's, as a Metta Nimitz, Silicon valley stands for something, but what it stands for is far more, far more simplistic than what's actually going on there. So, yeah.

[00:18:32] Katherine: You know, I think, um, God, it's funny, this, this conversation reminds me of, well, a lot of other, you know, conversations we've had such, like, we talk about open source ideology, a lot on this podcast, which is peripherally related to all of these things.

Right. Um, And sometimes, you know, when we've had Kyle, Kyle Rankin on the show, we've talked about, especially how sort of disconnected people are sometimes from the origins of open source and open sources, it hasn't come to mean something different, but people's understanding of it maybe has changed. And I think, I think that's, um, that there's a common thread here is.

You know, humans are a forgetful bunch. We're constantly redefining norms. We're constantly redefining, you know, our own, our own personal histories. Let alone everybody else's history. So I don't know what, so what does that mean for the web? Right. Well, If we can't remember, what we were working on 10 years ago, for those of us who were, what does that mean for what we will be working on in the future?

How do we even sort of conceive of where to look forward? I don't know. It's, it's, uh, an interesting, uh, I wouldn't call it a problem to solve, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

[00:19:49] Doc: When people say is open source, I'm not getting a good enough answer. Um, it's funny. Gotta be a a thousand years. If you did a search for the internet is, and then all the things they came after that were for the top one was always for porn. And, uh, and that was actually, there was a song with a little video, which is the internet is perfect for porn.

[00:20:19] Katherine: What is the, the musical avenue Q? Is that, is that some, a musical? I think it's avenue. Yeah. I don't know. I mean it, to some degree, if somebody asks me what is web to web, what was web 2.0, or what is web 2.0, all I can really remember about back then is rounded corners, rounded corners with gradients, 2.0 

[00:20:40] Petros: with CSS, right?

[00:20:42] Doc: Yeah. But I mean, actually with that brings up for me, and this is a little bit off our topics, but it still goes somewhere in it and it speaks of our dependence is. Most of the most search results these days get you to whoever's promoting something, you know, and rather than what page rank used to do, which is what are people linking to most, right?

What are the most link to things? And, and the link to that approach to page rank kind of gave you. Uh, window on the world and what the world was thinking rather than a window, what that we have now, which is what is the most promoted was paying the most to be in this position in a search result, you know, because SEO is overpowering, everything else.

I think it is so normative now that we don't have. We don't have a, a sense of what does, what does the world think of this? What is, you know, because, but then again, does the world link like it used to either that may not be the case either. So, you know, and I mean, I've conducted a little test to see how many people actually click on a link inside stuff I've written, then it's a remarkably low percentage.

You know, people use the follow links a lot. I think they follow links much less than it used to, but that's a empirical on my part. So. Yeah. 

[00:22:05] Katherine: So, so we wanted to keep this episode a little bit short today just because we're easing back into the year that a lot going on, we don't want to overwhelm anyone.

Right. We want you to look forward to listening to the next episode. But so one of the things I was thinking of it is I, you know what I would love for anybody out there listening. Um, we hope you are many. I would love for y'all to either email us, you can do that through the website or tweet at us, or do whatever, whatever makes you happy.

We're also on, um, on Mastodon, but let us know what you think. Web 2.0 even means what you know, or what does it mean today or how do you remember it? Yeah, or for you forget even 3.0, just don't even go there. Just what is, what is even 1.0? Oh yeah. And what's 1.0, what's one what's two. And where are, you know, what's three, because I think, I think before we start working on improving ourselves, I think we need to become aware of where we've been.

So, anyway, I just wanted to make sure I threw that out there before we, before we wrap up or anything. 

[00:23:15] Doc: And I'm wondering if there's an internet. I mean, the web is one thing you can do on you. There's a lot of other things you can do any internet. Is there a one, two and three of those? What are those?

[00:23:25] Katherine: E-commerce one, two and three.

[00:23:27] Doc: I mean an e-commerce for two. I mean, I think there's, I think you could actually draw a line between internet, some probably old point something and internet one with. The standing down of the NSF net and April 30th, 1995, which opened up e-commerce, you know, suddenly there was no backbone within the internet that forbid any kind of content.

And a bunch of stuff happened, but there's another one which when nobody ever talks about this or not, that I know of, which is when did appearing come around, when did that appearing made all kinds of things possible when basically all of the backbones of the internet and the, and the big providers of various kinds, all kinds of agreed.

If we're big here, we're not going to charge each other for, for traffic. We're just going to appear because it was too complicated. You know, the phone companies all build each other kind of, they all had, there was a business model there and appearing was actually a way to decide that there's not going to be a business model of this level and this layer of the internet.

And that, that was a big deal. When did that happen? I don't even know when that happened. You know, maybe somebody does, but it's an interesting question. When did that happen? Yeah, I think we're thinking of this all the wrong way. We need to go whole, hold on, hold on. We need to go straight to the source to the, to the one who invented the internet, Al Gore.

[00:24:53] Petros: Yeah, yeah. All have something to do with this. I mean, He knows, you know, in the beginning was ARPANET. Right. But anyway, he, you know, Al gore Knowles because he was there. So, yeah. So I've been surfing Khan and lots of other people. So, um, And when I've talked to vent about it, Vince has said, it's just, there's no one point anything happened, you know, there, there, like he he's pointed out to me that no, there actually was some e-commerce before NSF net stood down.

So Ken's the first, the first e-commerce or, you know what, I may be miss thinking this, but I thought the first commercial. Company to be able to sell something on internet was Domino's or pizza hut, one of those pizza companies. And I remember you were able to order their pizza through a video. I have request or something like that to look this up where there was trivia question quest, what was the first pizza sold on the internet?

It was a pizza hut. It looks like, uh.

[00:26:16] Katherine: Wait, don't give the answer. Okay. We have to give it in the next step. You got to have a cliffhanger Petros. We'll have the full answer, but hint, hint, it was apparently pizza. 

[00:26:31] Doc: I think it's something else. You know, it was the first mouse trap sold any internet, you know probably digusting things that were the first thing.

[00:26:40] Petros: Yeah. I, I don't know if this was the first commercial product sold. Uh, it likely was not. Um, I don't know.

[00:26:50] Katherine: But we're going to find out what was, and we're going to talk about it next time.

[00:26:58] Doc: Well, thanks. 

[00:27:00] Katherine: Yeah, I think, I think, I think that, I think that's a great place to leave it. I think, you know, we've got trivia for next time. We have, we have homework and, um, yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today, everyone. Thanks for hanging out our little conversation and we look forward to the next one.